In the next chapter of the connected economy, payments and identity are no longer the pipes and passwords behind commerce. They’re becoming the battleground for customer trust, seamless experiences and global scale.
In conversations with PYMNTS for the “From Trend to Table Stakes: Mapping the Next Payment Priorities 2025” edition of the What’s Next in Payments series, a chorus of senior leaders shared where they are placing their bets for tomorrow’s most impactful innovations.
Taken together, the executive discussions chart a path where trust, seamless experience, data-driven cloud architecture and global interoperability become the four cornerstones of competitive advantage in payments and identity.
These four themes also suggest a mindset shift: from compliance and point solutions to platform thinking, where building adaptive, interoperable, data-rich ecosystems that treat payments and identity not as costs of doing business, but as engines of customer value and innovation, is becoming the norm and not an exception.
Trust and Identity as Competitive Differentiators
In the emerging invisible economy, where transactions happen in the background and payment is felt only in its failure, the leaders PYMNTS interviewed agree that the next great differentiator will be how seamlessly and securely trust is embedded into every interaction.
“Identity and knowing your customer are absolutely a competitive advantage,” Trulioo Chief Technology Officer Hal Lonas told PYMNTS. “Fraud intelligence, onboarding, staying in touch with good customers; those are not just regulatory exercises.”
Trust is no longer just about cybersecurity; it is deeply intertwined with how companies handle identity. And in a digital marketplace crowded with alternatives, trust and identity are becoming the primary currencies.
“For a long time, most organizations have been around local trust and local controls,” Jonathan Beckham, chief product and technology officer at Edenred Pay, told PYMNTS. “What’s really interesting here is the interoperability of identity management … sharing and validating identity credentials even for businesses and their employees.”
“We have certificate issuers for secure websites, right? Those trusted providers are audited and have credentials themselves. I see that in a similar type of way within these KYB [know your business] and business identity credentials,” Beckham added.
The emerging insight is that businesses can’t build trust by slowing customers down, but by instead designing identity systems that offer confidence without inconvenience.
“We’re becoming quickly accustomed to additional authentication and security, [such as] two-factor authentication, fingerprint ID, face ID,” Seth Perlman, global head of product at i2c, told PYMNTS. “Apps that don’t have those will erode trust.”
Firms that succeed in integrating trust into the core of the experience can create a halo effect: Customers are more willing to try new services, link additional accounts and transact in larger volumes. Trust, in this sense, becomes a growth driver.
Smart Friction and Speed as Trust Builders
Digital services have long pursued frictionless transactions as a benchmark of good design. After all, conventional wisdom once held that the best experience was always the fastest. But as fraudsters’ methods have grown more sophisticated, executives have recognized the paradox: Speed without guardrails can erode trust.
“Frictionless checkout … is the baseline now,” Renata Caine, senior vice president and general manager of embedded finance at Green Dot, told PYMNTS. “Anything that delays that will erode trust with your customer.”
Hence, the rise of “smart friction” — intentional, minimal points of verification that reinforce security without frustrating legitimate users.
“We want to make sure all transactions are secure and getting to the right people in the right place, but without gigantic brick walls. Intelligent invisible guardrails. That’s where the industry is headed,” Edenred Pay’s Beckham said.
This view highlights friction as a contextual design choice rather than a flaw.
“Being smart about how you do it is key,” Trulioo’s Lonas said. “You might have a very frictionless process when you’re just getting to know someone. But when they start doing higher value transactions, now’s the time you need more surety.”
Done well, smart friction reassures customers that the platform is vigilant and fair. Done poorly, it breeds abandonment.
“Anyone building a payments ecosystem without [immediacy] front and center is missing the mark,” Rishi Patel, global head of product, Spring by Citi (Citi’s Payment Acceptance platform), told PYMNTS, adding that instant settlement and instant gratification are no longer perks but table stakes.
Invisible Guardrails and System Resilience
Another recurring theme in executive conversations is resilience. The payments and identity stack must function as an invisible backbone of commerce — always on, highly secure and adaptive to shocks ranging from cyberattacks to sudden spikes in transaction volumes.
“Everything has to be always on, always available. And if it’s not … that really instills seeds of doubt,” said i2c’s Perlman. “Do you know how much time 99.999% uptime allows you to be down during the course of a year? About five minutes and 15 seconds. If you’re pushing a billion dollars of volume, that’s a million dollars of lost volume right there.”
The margin for error in today’s landscape has, in effect, collapsed to zero.
“A customer of yours expects to pay how they want, whether it’s via card or wallet, buy now, pay later, or account to account,” Green Dot’s Caine said. But “a consumer is not considering that … all of these things have to occur in the background. It just has to work to keep the consumer satisfied.”
“Invisible guardrails” describe the protective mechanisms — redundant architectures, real-time anomaly detection, cross-network failovers — that support seamless operations. Customers rarely notice these layers until they fail, which is precisely why they matter so much.
The strategic stakes could not be higher. As commerce grows more borderless and customer expectations for frictionless experiences rise, the winners will be those who master the fusion of trust and speed on a global scale.
“First and foremost, it’s actually ensuring that you have coverage,” Citi’s Patel said. “And then it’s about making sure that in the way that you deploy those solutions, a consumer or a business customer can transact as seamlessly as possible. Those are the table stake features that are critical for our client to just get business done.”
“Helping our clients actually do business is the priority. The rest — rails, APIs, AI — are tools to get there,” he added.
Cloud, Data and Uniformity as Enablers
On top of everything, the ongoing shift to cloud-based, data-driven platforms is enabling both trust and seamless experience at scale. It’s a whole new playing field. Literally.
“Our customers are moving from the ‘lift and shift’ model that they used to use for cloud … to truly build cloud-native payment applications on AWS,” Nilesh Dusane, the global head of Institutional Payments at AWS, told PYMNTS.
Organizations built traditional on-premise systems for siloed functions. But these systems do not fit the real-time, cross-border flows of the modern economy. Cloud architectures allow providers to aggregate, analyze and act on vast data streams — from behavioral signals to transaction histories — in milliseconds.
“We really think about the richness of data. What we don’t want to be doing is providing data for card processing one way, data for pay by bank in another way,” Citi’s Patel said. Patel noted that it is crucial to provide payment data that merchants can easily integrate, regardless of the underlying mechanism.
This data richness powers smarter risk models and more personalized user experiences. It also supports uniformity: The consistent application of policies and services across geographies, product lines and devices. For global businesses and their customers, uniformity is more than an operational convenience; it underpins interoperability.
Platform thinking reframes the challenge. Instead of patching together disparate point solutions — each addressing a specific regulation or use case — leaders are building unified platforms that integrate risk, identity, data and user experience. Such platforms not only reduce technical debt but also enable faster innovation, as businesses can launch new services on a trusted, standardized backbone.
